Beautiful Ruins (64)

And now, morning after, Claire sits up. “This wasn’t very professional of me.”

“Depends on your profession.”

She laughs. “If you paid for that I think you got ripped off.”

He puts his hand back on her hip. “There’s still time.”

She laughs, takes his hand from her hip and sets it on the bed. But she can’t say she isn’t tempted. The kissing and rolling around were nice enough; she assumes the sex would be good. With Daryl, the sex was the first thing between them, the selling point, the foundation for a whole relationship. But in the last few months, she’s felt as if the intimacy has seeped out of it and now there are two distinct phases to sex with Daryl: the first two minutes like an exam from an autistic gynecologist, the next ten a visit from the Roto-Rooter man. At the very least, she imagines, Shane would be . . . present.

Conflicted, confused, she stands, to think, or to buy time.

“Where are you going?”

Claire holds up her phone. “See if I still have a boyfriend.”

“I thought you were going to break up with him.”

“I haven’t decided.”

“I’ll decide for you.”

“I appreciate that, but I should probably take care of it.”

“And if the porn-zombie asks where you were all night?”

“Guess I’ll tell him.”

“Will he break up with you?”

She hears some bit of hopefulness in the question. “I don’t know,” she says. She pulls the chair out from the desk, sits, and begins thumbing through the calls and e-mails on her phone, to see when Daryl called last.

Shane sits up, too, now, swings his feet over the edge of the bed, and grabs his shirt off the floor. She glances up, can’t help but smile at his scrawny attractiveness. He’s an aging version of the boys she always fell for in college: in the vicinity of good-looking but a few blocks away. Physically, he’s the anti-Daryl (square-jawed Daryl with his five-hundred-push-ups-a-day chest)—Shane all narrow angles and jutting collarbones, just the hint of a roll in his gut. “When, exactly, did you take your shirt off?” she asks.

“I’m not sure. I guess I was hoping to start a trend.”

She goes back to her BlackBerry, opens Daryl’s “what up” text, and tries to figure out what to type back. Her thumbs hover over the keys. But nothing comes.

“So what did you see in this guy?” Shane asks. “Originally?”

Claire glances up. What did she see? It’s too corny to say—but she saw all the clichéd shit: Stars. Flashes of light. Babies. A future. She saw all of this the very first night, as they banged through her apartment door, flinging clothes and chewing each other’s lips and reaching and prodding and cupping—and then he lifted her off the ground and all of her college fumblings became as insignificant as bumping into someone on a stairwell. She felt exactly like she’d never been fully alive before the moment Daryl first touched her. And it wasn’t just sex; he was inside her. She’d never really thought about that phrase until that night, when in the middle of it she looked up and saw herself . . . every bit of herself . . . in his eyes.

Claire shakes the memory off. How could she possibly say any of that, especially here? And so she simply says, “Abs. I saw abs.” And it’s odd; she feels worse for dismissing Daryl as a set of stomach muscles than she does for being in this hotel room with a boy she just met.

Shane nods again at the cell phone in her hands. “So . . . what are you going to tell him?”

“No idea.”

“Tell him we’re falling in love; that’ll end it.”

“Yeah?” She looks up. “Are we?”

He smiles as he snaps the buttons on his faux Western shirt. “Maybe. We could be. How will we know if we don’t spend the day together.”

“Impulsive much?”

“Key to my quirky appeal.”

Goddamn it; she thinks that might be the case—his appeal. She recalls Shane saying that he married the harsh, truth-telling waitress after dating for only a few months. She’s not surprised—who even uses the words falling in love fourteen hours after meeting someone? There is something undeniably . . . optimistic about him. And for a moment, she wonders if she ever had such a quality. “Can I ask you something?” Claire says. “Why the Donner Party?”

“Oh, no,” he says. “You’re just looking for a laugh again.”

“I told you, I’m sorry about that. It’s just that for three years Michael has rejected every idea I bring in as being too dark, too expensive, too period . . . not commercial enough. Then you come in yesterday with—no offense—the darkest, least commercial, most expensive period film I’ve ever heard about, and he loves it. It’s just so . . . unlikely. I just wondered where it came from.”

Shane shrugs and reaches for one of his socks on the floor. “I have three older sisters. All of my early memories are of them. I loved them; I was their toy, like a doll they dressed up. When I was six or so, my oldest sister, Olivia, developed an eating disorder. Just about destroyed our family.

“It was awful. Olivia was thirteen, and she’d go in the bathroom and throw up. She’d spend her lunch money on diet pills, squirrel food away in her clothes. At first my parents yelled at her, but that did no good. She didn’t care. It was like she wanted to waste away. You could see the bones in her arms. Her hair falling out.